Wrestling with the labels that outsiders put upon him fuelled his interest in style, in clothes, and in labels that come from Paris and Milan. "My interest in fashion probably would have developed anyway," he continues. "But all this stuff made me ask myself in a really focused way: 'What do I represent?'†And you know what? My racial heritage is something I want people to be well aware of. I do want to be a representative of the African community, and I want to hold myself and dress myself in a way that reflects that. I want black kids to see me and think: 'OK, he's carrying himself as a black man, and that's how a black man should carry himself.'"-Colin Kaepernick

The Brazilian state recently adopted unprecedented race-targeted affirmative action in government hiring and university admissions. Scholarship would predict the state‚Äôs institutionalization of racial categories has ‚Äúrace-making‚ÄĚ effects. In this article, we ask whether the Brazilian state‚Äôs policy turnabout has affected racial subjectivities on the ground, specifically toward mirroring the categories used by the state. To answer, we conceptualize race as multidimensional and leverage two of its dimensions‚ÄĒlay identification and government classification (via open-ended and closed-ended questions, respectively)‚ÄĒto introduce a new metric of state race-making: a comparison of the extent of alignment between lay and government dimensions across time. Logistic regression on large-sample survey data from before the policy turn (1995) and well after its diffusion (2008) reveals an increased use of state categories as respondents‚Äô lay identification in the direction of matching respondents‚Äô government classification. We conclude that the Brazilian state is making race but not from scratch nor in ways that are fully intended.

Census ethnoracial categories often reflect national ideologies and attendant subjectivities. Nonetheless, Brazilians frequently prefer the non-census terms moreno (brown) and negro (black), and both are core to antithetical ideologies: racial ambiguity versus racial affirmation. Their use may be in flux as Brazil recently adopted unprecedented race-targeted public policy. We examine propensities to self-classify as moreno and negro before and after the policy shift. Using regression modeling on national survey data from 1995 and 2008 that captured self-classification in open and closed formats, we find moreno is highly salient but increasingly constricted, while negro is restricted in use, though increasingly popular. Negro‚Äôs growth is mostly confined to the darker pole of Brazil‚Äôs color continuum. Education correlates in opposing directions: negative with moreno and positive with negro. Our findings proxy broad ideological shift from racial ambiguity to negro racial affirmation. They suggest race-targeted policy is transforming racial subjectivities and ideologies in Brazil.

We address long-standing debates on the utility of racial categories and color scales for understanding inequality in the United States and Latin America, using novel data that enable comparisons of these measures across both broad regions. In particular, we attend to the degree to which color and racial category inequality operate independently of parental socioeconomic status. We find a variety of patterns of racial category and color inequality, but that in most countries accounting for maternal education changes our coefficients by 5% or less. Overall, we argue that several posited divergences in ethnoracial stratification processes in the United States, compared with Latin America, might be overstated. We conclude that the comparison of the effects of multiple ethnoracial markers, such as color and racial categories, for the analysis of social stratification holds substantial promise for untangling the complexities of ‚Äúrace‚ÄĚ across the Americas.

The Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies (JCMRS) is a peer-reviewed online journal dedicated to developing the field of Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) through rigorous scholarship. Launched in 2011, it is the first academic journal explicitly focused on Critical Mixed Race Studies.

JCMRS is transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational in focus and emphasizes the critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political orders based on dominant conceptions and constructions of ‚Äėrace.‚Äô JCMRS emphasizes the constructed nature and thus mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. JCMRS addresses local and global systemic injustices rooted in systems of racialization.

The essence of this [racial democracy] myth is contained within an allegory common to school texts in Brazil addressing the origins of that nation‚Äôs population: the ‚Äúfable of three races‚ÄĚ (Da Matta 1997). This fable holds that the people of Brazil originated from three formerly discrete racial entities: Europeans, Africans, and Indians. These ‚Äúraces‚ÄĚ subsequently mixed, each contributing to the formation of a uniquely Brazilian population, culturally and biologically fused, whose strength is in its hybridism. Results from a 1998 national survey speak to the embedded nature of this fusion understanding. Brazilians were asked in open-ended format: ‚ÄúOf what ancestry (origem) do you consider yourself to be?‚ÄĚ To this question, 68 percent responded simply ‚ÄúBrazilian,‚ÄĚ with only 3.5 percent replying ‚Äúindigenous,‚ÄĚ 5.8 percent answering ‚ÄúPortuguese,‚ÄĚ and 1.4 percent saying ‚ÄúAfrican‚ÄĚ) (Schwartzman 1999).

Group dominance perspectives contend that ideologies are central to the production and reproduction of racial oppression by their negative affect on attitudes toward antiracism initiatives. The Brazilian myth of racial democracy frequently is framed in this light, evoked as a racist ideology to explain an apparent lack of confrontation of racial inequality. Data from a 2000 probability sample of racial attitudes in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, contradict this long-held assertion, showing that most Brazilians in this state recognize racism as playing a role in Brazilian society, support the idea of affirmative action, and express interest in belonging to antiracism organizations. Moreover, opinions on affirmative action appear more strongly correlated with social class, as measured by education level, than race. As compared with results from the United States regarding opinions on similar selected affirmative action policies, the racial gap in Brazilian support for affirmative action is only moderate. Results also show that those who recognize the existence of racial discrimination in Brazil are more likely to support affirmative action. Implications for race theorizing from a group dominance perspective in Brazil as well as for antiracism strategies are addressed.

Quantitative analyses of racial disparities typically rely on a single categorical measure to operationalize race. We demonstrate the value of an approach that compares results obtained using various measures of race. Using a national probability sample of the Brazilian population that captured race in six formats, we first show how the racial composition of Brazil can shift from majority white to majority black depending on the classification scheme. In addition, using quantile regression, we find that racial disparities are most severe at the upper end of the income distribution; that racial disparities in earnings are larger when race is defined by interviewers rather than self-identified; and that those classified as ‚Äúblack‚ÄĚ suffer a greater wage penalty than those classified as ‚Äúbrown.‚ÄĚ Our findings extend prior conclusions about racial inequality in Brazil. More generally, our analysis demonstrates that comparison of results across measures represents a neglected source of analytic leverage for advancing empirical knowledge and theoretical understanding of how race, as a multidimensional social construct, contributes to the production of social inequality.

Many scholars advocate the adoption of a black-and-white lens for the analysis of racial inequality in Brazil. Drawing on a nationally representative dataset that includes race questions in multiple formats, we evaluate how removal of the ‚Äėbrown‚Äô category from the census or other social surveys would likely affect: (1) the descriptive picture of Brazil’s racial composition; and (2) estimates of income inequality between and within racial categories. We find that a forced binary question format results in a whiter and more racially unequal picture of Brazil through the movement of many higher income mixed-race respondents into the white category. We also find that regardless of question format, racial inequality in income accounts for relatively little of Brazil’s overall income inequality. We discuss implications for public policy debates in Brazil, and for the broader scientific and political challenges of ethnic and racial data collection and analysis.

The U.S. Census Bureau‚Äôs adoption of the mark ‚Äúone or more races‚ÄĚ format in 2000 is viewed by some scholars as a racial revolution of sorts. It may signal a changing tide from monoracial understandings of population diversity (i.e., recognizing only single racial heritages) to the interpellation of a more complex phenomenon of multiraciality. Framing this shift as from a binary (black vs. white) to a ternary racial project (white, multiracial, black), sociologist G. Reginald Daniel contributes significantly to our understanding of the contentious issues surrounding this development. Importantly, he does so as an insider, having been active in social movements promoting the recent Census recognition of multiracial identities (p. 5).

In his latest book, Daniel juxtaposes the shifting U.S. dynamic with changes underway in Brazil. Interestingly, that context appears to be moving in the opposite direction, from ternary (white, brown/multiracial, black) to binary (white vs. negro) racial understandings. Hence, he subtitles his book ‚ÄúConverging Paths,‚ÄĚ situating it as a must-read for students of comparative racial dynamics. There has yet to be a census adoption of the binary project in Brazil, but it may only be a matter of time.

Framed, then, as a push and pull between binary and ternary racial projects, Daniel‚Äôs goal is to understand similarities and differences in these countries‚Äô racial formations and their consequences for both the production of inequality and for the possibility of overcoming it. To do so, he offers an extensive exploration of the existing literature on to media (print, television, and internet) and census bureau/governmental sources, social movement activists, and observations of public behavior in Brazil and the United States. Although the exposition of this extensive material in this comparative fashion constitutes the contribution of this book, much of the material is drawn from his previously published work, as the author points out (pp. 5‚Äď6)…

At the federal university in Brazil‚Äôs capital city, Bras√≠lia, a special committee was constituted in 2004 to evaluate the application file photographs of self-classified negros (read ‚Äúblacks‚ÄĚ or ‚ÄúAfro-Brazilians‚ÄĚ) applying to the university via a new racial quota system. An anthropologist, a sociologist, a student representative, and three negro movement actors make up that committee, and their identities are kept sub secreto (Maio and Santos 2005). If the committee does not consider a candidate to be a negro or negra, then he or she is disqualified. The applicant can, however, appeal the decision and appear in person before the committee to contest his or her racial classification (Universidade de Bras√≠lia 2004). The State University of Mato Grosso do Sul has also adopted the use of photographs and a verification committee for a racial quota system (UEMS 2004). At that institution, the committee is made up of two university representatives and three negro movement actors (Corr√™a 2003).

This unusual modus operandi highlights a period of instability in racial categories, associated with a novel phase in the political struggle for identity and inclusion by the Brazilian negro movement. Through a multifaceted process, but without disruptive protest or mass mobilizations, the movement has successfully pressured state actors to mandate negro inclusion in higher education and to encode that legislation with language emic to the movement. The label negro is not an official census term; the Brazilian state has for well over a century used a ternary, or three-category, format to represent the black-white color continuum that includes an intermediate or mixed-race category. In contrast, negro is part of a dichotomous racial scheme, counterposed to white, whose novelty in official contexts leads to the thorny issue of defining its boundaries. Nonetheless, some 30 Brazilian public universities have already adopted race-targeted policies (Ribeiro 2007).¬† Moreover, legislation is now before the national congress mandating that all federal universities adopt racial quotas‚Ä¶